Classification: LCC PT2625.U8 M313 2019 (print) | LCC PT2625.U8 (ebook) | DDC 833/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025132

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019025133

ISBN 978-1-68137-384-3

v 1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

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CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

A Note on the Translation

Editorial Note

AGATHE

1. The Forgotten Sister

2. TRUST

3. DAYBREAK IN A HOUSE OF MOURNING

4. “I ONCE HAD A COMRADE”

5. THEY DO WRONG

6. THE OLD GENTLEMAN IS FINALLY LEFT IN PEACE

7. A FAMILY OF TWO

8. AGATHE WHEN SHE CANNOT TALK TO ULRICH

9. FURTHER COURSE OF THE EXCURSION TO THE SWEDISH RAMPART. THE MORALITY OF THE NEXT STEP

10. HOLY CONVERSATIONS. BEGINNING

11. HOLY CONVERSATIONS. CHANGEFUL DEVELOPMENTS

12. THE WILL

13. DIFFICULTIES OF A MORALIST IN WRITING A LETTER

14. THROW EVERYTHING YOU HAVE INTO THE FIRE, INCLUDING YOUR SHOES

15. FROM KONIATOWSKI’S CRITIQUE OF DANIELLI’S THEOREM TO THE FALL OF MAN. FROM THE FALL OF MAN TO THE EMOTIONAL RIDDLE OF THE SISTER

16. AGATHE IS REALLY HERE

17. THE SIAMESE TWINS

18. TOO MUCH GAIETY

19. PROFESSOR HAGAUER PUTS PEN TO PAPER

20. ULRICH AND AGATHE LOOK FOR A REASON AFTER THE FACT

21. AGATHE WANTS TO COMMIT SUICIDE AND MAKES THE ACQUAINTANCE OF A GENTLEMAN

22. A CONVERSATION ON MORALITY

23. AFTER THE ENCOUNTER

24. THE DO-GOODER

25. THE SIBLINGS THE NEXT MORNING

26. UP JACOB’S LADDER TO A STRANGER’S HOME

27. THE DO-GOODER AND THE GOOD-FOR-NOTHING. BUT ALSO AGATHE

28. A MIGHTY COLLOQUY

29. BEGINNING OF A SERIES OF WONDROUS EXPERIENCES

30. MOONBEAMS BY DAYLIGHT

31. STROLLS AMONG THE CROWD

32. LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF

33. CONVERSATIONS ABOUT LOVE

34. DIFFICULTIES WHERE THEY ARE NOT LOOKED FOR

35. LOVING IS NOT SIMPLE

36. BREATHS OF A SUMMER DAY

Acknowledgments

Notes

INTRODUCTION

We don’t have too much intellect and too little soul, but too little intellect in matters of the soul.

—Robert Musil

1

I AM LOOKING at a photograph of a late-middle-aged man in a gray suit with broad lapels. He is wearing a bow tie. There are dark leaves behind him and the lines of a sunlit house. His right hand dangles across the armrest of a wicker chair in which he is sitting with one leg draped over the other. The left hand, wearing a signet ring, rests on a round table and is loosely holding a cigarette. The face could belong to a European diplomat or businessman of a now extinct type: refined, austere, intellectual. The dark, dense eyebrows add an expression of calm virility. The only incongruous detail is the eyes: they are closed. One assumes at first that the snapshot was taken at the moment of blinking. But it is difficult to imagine this face with the eyes open, because all its features and in fact the whole gesture of the body, which at first glance appeared so urbanely relaxed in its well-tailored suit, are drained of motility, as if drugged. At any minute, the cigarette may drop from between those slackly curved fingers. Is this a picture of mortal exhaustion or of extremely attenuated contemplation? Probably it is both. The man depicted is Robert Musil, who died at the age of sixty-one, less than two years after this photograph was taken. At his funeral, which was attended by eight people, the eulogist applied to Musil a statement Musil had made about Rilke: “He was not a summit of this age—he was one of those elevations upon which the destiny of the human spirit strides across ages.”